Seth has a long and interesting discussion of nth-ary liability in his diary today. However, I think he should have treated at more length the slight-of-hand involved in the "tools for circumventing copy control are like tools for breaking into houses" argument. Here's how I see that slight-of-hand: by making that argument you admit to a belief that something you've sold to someone else is analagous to your house, and that the person who bought it and wants to use it is analagous to someone trying to break in. (cf.) Of course, it's no big secret that most organizations which put out cultural artifacts don't consider you as having anything other than circumscribed viewing rights once you "own" "it" "on" "DVD", but it's a less well-known position than it should be, and it's doubtful that other people who accept this argument would accept it if they saw that axiom.

Sat May 25 2002 10:24:
I'm sort of ashamed that I didn't know that there was a Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic. This makes many things clearer, including why 1 is not considered a prime number (as I suspected from various hemming-and-hawing explanations I've gotten over the years, there's no real reason--it just makes the FTA a lot uglier).

However, this revelation increases my forboding feeling that algebra is in some bizarre sense the derivative of calculus, and arithmetic the second derivative.